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Release Notes 1.6 – April 11, 2016

On April 11th we updated ACORN with a fairly substantial set of enhancements and fixes. We’ve introduced a number of new convenience features and addressed quite a few nagging annoying bugs. Our work over the coming months will be focused on more of the same with several high priority new features and functionality rolling out.

Enhancement: On the Enrol & Manage screen we display a number of academic support resources that are tailored to the home campus of a student. We’ve updated the layout and styling for these resources and added new content.

Enhancement: A better printed layout of the invoice for all! In an effort to make this document as good as possible we revised how the invoice is laid out with U of T headings, contact information and document layout. This can be easily downloaded as a PDF through most browsers or printed directly from ACORN.

Enhancement: Similar to the invoice, we’ve improved the printed version of the personal timetable. This should be better represented when printed in black and white as well as in colour.

Enhancements: A number of enhancements (and a couple fixes) were introduced to the convocation section of ACORN. This was an area that saw a full redesign prior to November and we had a few more updates to roll-out for spring convocation.

Enhancement: Display of fee deferrals and financial arrangements. E.g. say you managed to successfully defer your fees during the summer for the upcoming Fall/Winter academic year. Until now, ACORN wouldn’t display this deferral until the fall term began. This quite reasonably caused confusion and some concern for students if they didn’t see their fee deferral displayed. ACORN will now show a list of financial arrangements for future sessions on the dashboard as well the Financial Account screen.

Enhancement: When enrolling in a course via the enrolment cart, a success notification appears in the top right of the screen. An extraneous notification indicating the course was removed from your enrolment cart was also displayed. Given this is redundant information, we’ve removed that messaging.

Enhancement: Program search results will now only display appropriate results depending on the students home campus and will not display for graduate students, given they don’t use this functionality on ACORN.

Enhancement: Accessibility improvements for dashboard notifications for students using screen readers, keyboard commands and other assistive tech.

Enhancement: Enrolled courses list is now displayed in a more logical alphabetical order. Previously courses were listing alphabetically based on their title, not their course code. We’ve updated this to improve ease of scanning through enrolled courses.

Fixed: For a short time (a couple of hours), the dates controlling displayed information such as enrolled courses in a session fell on the floor. At its worst, this looked to a student like they weren’t enrolled in classes anymore for the current session. We jumped on this one quickly and fixed this as fast as we could.

Fixed: An aesthetic issue relating to ordering transcripts where when the screen viewport was constrained, transcript status buttons would jut off the status card container. This hurt was hurting our eyes (and soul), so we fixed it.

Fixed: A minor aesthetic issue pertaining to text on the fee deferral screen. In ACORN we try to avoid using too many styles in our text content meaning to avoid a mishmash of bold, highlights, colours and italicized fonts all at once. We try to intentionally use consistent styles and call out (actually) important content as needed. We missed a spot on the fee deferral page and adjusted accordingly.

Fixed: For courses with multiple titles in our ROSI system of record, ACORN was picking these up and awkwardly displaying them as entries on a student course list or search results. There wasn’t any harm done by this other than causing a bit of confusion. This has now been fixed.

Fixed: Course activity section times occasionally displayed out of order on course listings. Rather than display logically as say Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, some courses would display as Monday, Thursday, Tuesday. An annoyance no longer.

Fixed: A more complete fix for an issue initially addressed in January regarding students switching from course sections that are closed behind the scenes.

Fixed: Activities on course modals for which we didn’t have information (class location, instructor etc) would show up as blank spaces. We’ve bumped this up to ‘TBA’ for clarity’s sake.

Fixed: Course modals with a long list of course activities requiring scrolling would cut off the modal header from view. This fixes this issue and makes the modal headers and footers stick in place while still permitting scrolling.